Sara Montiel started in movies at 16 in her native Spain where she filmed her first international success playing an Islamic princess in the 1948 film Locura de Amor. Later she conquered Mexico, starring in a dozen films in less than five years. Hollywood came calling afterwards, and she was introduced to US moviegoers in the film Vera Cruz (1954) co-starring with Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster, and directed by Robert Aldrich. She was offered the standard seven-year contract at Columbia Pictures, which she quickly refused, afraid of Hollywood's typecasting policies for Hispanics. Instead she free-lanced at Warner Bros. with Mario Lanza and Joan Fontaine in Serenade (1956), directed by Anthony Mann, and at RKO in Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow (1957), opposite Rod Steiger and Charles Bronson.

That same year she married Anthony Mann but returned briefly to Spain to star in a low budget film musical El Ultimo Cuplé as a favor to producer-director Juan de Orduña who had helped her career in the early days. This film made her unexpectedly the number one actress-singer of that year in Europe and Latin America and she accepted a multi-million dollar offer for more films and recordings in Europe. It was obvious that Hollywood could not offer anything better, so she moved back to Spain and to a career that is now legendary. Fifteen monumentally successful films followed her Cuplé success (including La Violetera (1958), Carmen, la de Ronda (1959, a very personal rendition of the Carmen myth), Mi Ultimo Tango (1960), Pecado de Amor(1961), La Bella Lola (1962, her own version of "Camille"), La Reina del Chantecler (a 1963 blockbuster specially in the Soviet Union and countries behind the Iron Curtain), Noches de Casablanca, (a 1963 tribute to Hollywood's Casablanca), Samba (1964), La Dama de Beirut (1965), La Mujer Perdida (1966), Tuset Street (1967), Esa Mujer (1969), Varietés (1971), etc. During these years she also recorded over 30 highly successful albums and appeared on stage and television all over the world.

In 1974 Montiel announced her retirement from movies but continued performing live, recording and starring on her own variety television shows in Spain. She kept on at that pace well into the 1990s. In 2000 her autobiography Memories: To Live Is A Pleasure became a huge best seller, followed by a second part Sara and Sex, which highlighted her love life.

In 2006 Montiel temporarily put aside her career in order to help her adopted son Zeus with his first recordings.